MILDEW.
I awoke to mildew—that particular rot of standing water and neglect—and recognized it before I recognized anything else.
But my eyes adjusted faster to the newfound surroundings than anything else. Peeling paint of the walls, dirty dishes in the sink, grime and dust everywhere. The slow archaeology of a life abandoned.
I have returned.
It struck like voltage. Memory came in behind it, not gently, not in sequence, but all at once.
Then the old urge surfaced. It was less a craving than a pressure, the kind that lives in the bones and makes the skin feel borrowed.
A hand slipped into my pocket. My thumb, following the old reflex, found the cold metal wheel on its own.
She deserves better than this.
I withdrew my trembling hand and reached instead for the line of dirty clothes.
"Lumi... Lumi!"
The door swung open to darkness.
I forced my eyes to adjust. Broken glass scattered across the centre of the floor, capturing what little light reached in from the hall. Dirty clothes, plastic plates, and trash bags splitting at the seams. The room was something long given up on.
But in the corner stood a mattress without a frame.
A frail, pale-faced girl sat on it with her back to the wall, staring at the ceiling. Unblinking at doorway light. Unflinching at the door's sudden swing. As though she had long since stopped expecting anything from either.
I crossed the room in three steps and gripped her bony shoulders. I was no saviour. I had no right to the role because I was the one who had left her here, in this, alone. But I was here now. That had to mean something. It had to be made to mean something.
The words lodged in my throat like mud.
Her eyes were murky and absent in the way worse than absence.
I shook her. I shook her until her neck craned, like a little bird uncertain of a hand, to meet my gaze.
I wished they hadn't. Those eyes went straight through me.
"D-dad?"
It was less a question than a sound her body made before her mind had caught up.
I had endured years of regret and repent to hear her again.
"Dumpling." My voice broke on the word. "I'm sorry. I am so sorry."
I pulled her into me. There was a frightened inhale, but I didn't let go. She was here. She was real. I didn't know how, or why, or anything about this second chance. I only knew I wouldn't waste this one.
*
*
*
I lost all sense of time. I held her until she began to squirm, and then I released her. But the distance felt unbearable. I pulled her to settle on my lap, her back to me, both of us facing the ruin of the room
"Did I hurt you, dumpling?"
Her hair was coarse and matted under my palm. I wanted to work through the tangles, but she flinched at the touch, and I withdrew.
"I-I'm sorry, dumpling."
"It's okay," she mumbled.
"Dad won't hurt you." I paused. Like she did. I didn't say it aloud.
Lumi turned her head. There was a frown and something else in her eyes, and I recognized it as something she needed me to sit with.
I turned her around to face me.
Her thin, chapped lips parted. "It's not bruised and it's not bleeding," she said carefully, "but it hurts here." Her hand hovered over her chest.
Something behind my eyes went hot. She was six years old. She knew to distinguish bruises from bleeding, as though she had needed that vocabulary before. Of course she had.
"I know, baby dumpling." My voice had gone to almost nothing. "I know. Dad made a grave mistake. Dad let you down."
I looked around the room, this so-called bedroom, this accumulated evidence of my failure, and let myself see it plainly for the first time.
"Dad wasn't there for you in the dark. When there was thunder. When there were nightmares." I swallowed. "Dad wasn't there in the screaming or the fighting. When you needed someone between you and all of it."
Through the blur of tears I saw Lumi shudder, and something seized in my chest.
"Don't be afraid, dumpling. She is gone. Things are different now. I am different. Dad is here—he will always be here now, okay?"
She went still.
A long silence.
"She is gone?" Lumi whispered. She leaned into me, her faint breath warm against my chest.
I tightened my arms across her back. "Gone for good. It isn't scary anymore."
I had hoped that saying it plainly would be easier. Now I wasn't certain.
Then she moved.
"I'm not scared," Lumi said, wrestling herself free of my arms with a sudden, uncoordinated energy entirely at odds with her frailty a moment ago.
The relief was physical. Colour had returned to her face. Her eyes curved upward at the corners and the defiant set of her expression was so mismatched with the smallness of her voice that I almost laughed.
I did laugh, quietly, and reached over to smooth her bangs.
"If you're not scared, then what are you feeling?" I asked.
She looked towards the ceiling. Not with the murkiness from before. This time was different, with the innocent gaze of a child genuinely searching herself.
"I don't know," she said at last. "I, um, it's..."
Six years old and reaching for words that adults spend a lifetime never finding. The sourness in my chest deepened at the circumstances that had produced this careful, observant, vocabulary-less child. I had been part of those circumstances. I had been the primary one.
"That's okay, dumpling. You know the feeling. You just can't say it yet." She hummed, soft and considering. "You'll find the words as you grow. Tell Dad everything you feel, as you go. All of it."
A pause.
"I want to know what you're feeling as well, Dad."
The request itself didn't catch me off guard, but the steadiness of it did. She had asked it the way someone asks who already understands that the answer will be complicated, and has decided to want it anyway.
"What I'm feeling is a more complicated version of what you feel, dumpling," I said carefully. I wasn't trying to diminish her; I wanted to reach her.
"Com-pli-ca-ted," she repeated, tasting the syllables.
"Yes, dumpling. When something has too many pieces, it becomes hard to hold all at once. Hard even to look at."
She tilted her head. "I want to learn more about you, Dad. I want to know everything."
The word everything landed with a weight disproportionate to its size. I thought it over. I attributed it to my absence, to all the years she had lost.
"Are you curious about Dad? Do you have a lot of questions to ask about Dad?"
Her gaze was clear and open and entirely without accusation, and yet guilt moved through me like a hurricane.
I didn't want to perform a confession. I didn't want the accounting of my failures to stand in for something real. But her eyes were expectant and her shoulders were thin and I had run out of reasons to protect myself.
Though I didn't want to, I emptied myself out anyways. "Where do I start?"
Then I did. High school. The accident. The temper, the fighting, the wrong people in the wrong rooms. Nicotine, and then other things. And then, at the end of all that wreckage, an unexpected pregnancy that I had met with everything I had, which at the time was nothing.
My voice had gone hoarse by the finish. It was barely a whisper. I had expected her to drift away in boredom. After all, she was only six and the context was beyond her. The words itself were beyond her. But when I finally looked down, she was still watching me with the same unbroken attention she had given me from the start.
"Sorry, dumpling. I must've bored you. Dad talked and talked. You must've not understood much."
I reached over to stroke her hair.
But her hand closed gently around my arm.
"No, Dad. I understood everything."